These are just three examples. "We first saw the links
spreading on Twitter," Chris Boyd, a malware intelligence analyst
at Malwarebytes. told
Wired.co.uk. "[They were] a mixture of tweets leading to known
sites originally posted to Facebook and a new batch of spamblogs,
survey scams [and] imitation news sites."

The technique is by no means new, but that does not make it any
less harmful.

Boyd says he has tracked hundreds of similar scams related to
the Japanese Tsunami of 2011 and last year's earthquake in the
Philippines. "They ranged from Malware and 419 scams to fake
donation pages and search engine poisoning," Boyd tells
Wired.co.uk. "Anything involving a potential disaster is big money
for the scammers, as there's a split between clickers with a
penchant for salacious content and those who simply want to know if
a relative is okay or if there's any more news on a breaking
disaster."

The scam artists tend to profit from the fake surveys that
appear if users follow the links, after being encouraged to share
the video or "news story" on Facebook.

In a blog post Boyd explains how the public is being drawn in with
buttons that ask them to share a "Pray for MH370" group page on
Facebook. "This is because the fake video sites are most commonly
made to look like Facebook pages," he says, "which means potential
clickers feel more comfortable with what they are seeing."

Some links lead users to realistic looking news sites, where the
user must click "share" before viewing the video.

Any user that fills out associated surveys will be sharing
personal information with third party marketers the scammers sell
on the information to. "Popular fake scam pages can be shared
hundreds of thousands of times, and there's big money in it for
anybody willing to plumb the depths of human misery," says Boyd.
"There have also been cases of survey networks serving up malware
files, so these scams are never quite as straightforward as they
seem."